


End of the Path

by Go0se



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Marble Hornets
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Injury, Not Beta Read, Young Amelia Pond, against all evidence Jay [redacted] is okay, sort of treated seriously but also not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 16:07:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1863954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jay regained consciousness in a strange place. He was pretty sure he got shot, but the people and room around him was disorienting him enough he wasn't sure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	End of the Path

**Author's Note:**

> Dearest fandom, I feel we need to up our crossover game. Also I’m a little bitter about how series 5-8 of Doctor Who went, and this a bad combination because you know what it produces? It produces this.  
> Because reasons. Spoilers for #80, and if you don’t know what that means by now keep your innocence. I didn't even really do more than a cursory edit of it but I hope you enjoy.

//

Jay woke up into pain. Stabbing and intense and localized, instead of the all-over ache of sleeplessness and gnawing hunger he’d gotten to used to over the weeks. He tried opening his eyes but they felt glued shut.  
“You don’t want to look,” someone said.  
  
The voice was young and had the wrong accent; they sounded like Braveheart, he thought stupidly. But who did he know who was a little kid and _Scottish?_ No one who’d be around Alabama much. Panic started working its familiar frantic route through him.  With an actual effort Jay pulled open his eyes—  
squeezed them shut a second later, shouting, cringing so hard he convulsed half-upright while something got pulled out of his stinging abdomen, sharp like a splinter—-  
abruptly, all the pain ceased. He fell back against something flat that wasn't ground or concrete. Instinctively his hands flew to where the pain had been, pressing down to find-- nothing. Nothing at all, not even a scar.

“Careful, the nanogenes are still spending themselves out working.” A different voice said; faster-paced, older, probably a man’s. _What._  
“Am I in the hospital?” Jay choked out.  
“No, you didn’t need something like that, not so serious, just a quick hit of nanogenes and some magnetizing-therapy is all.” The second voice got louder and suddenly a bright light shone directly in his eyes.   
Jay winced and turned away, but the light had already left. He could make out vague smudges of shapes but they hurt his head. He just closed his eyes again, trying to wake himself up.   
“You’re on my ship,” the second voice continued. “She wasn’t happy for us to go get you, oh no, but she did anyway. Clever old girl. More than happy to get out, that’s what counts. How do you feel?”  
“I…” Jay paused. He passed his hands over his face carefully. He felt strange. Like his head was clear, the way it had not been in a long time. “Better?” He hazarded.  
“Good, good.” There was a rumbling noise somewhere and a clatter of footsteps over to it, accompanied by a, “Ohhhh dear that was almost very bad. Nothing to worry about!”

 

“You can open your eyes now,” the first voice said. They— she— was definitely Scottish. “It’s alright here.”  
He did, slowly. The light and the shapes resolved themselves to make sense.   
A little girl stood beside him; red hair and chubby cheeks and a curious expression on her face, her arms stuck in the pockets of her rainjacket. She looked familiar. The curved wall and vaulted ceiling he could see above her was also familiar, but he had no idea how.   
He rolled over. The other side of the room, was it a room? The other side of the place he was in had the same style of walls and ceiling, all brightly lit up. Light reflected off of them like metal. Underneath him there was some kind of plastic stretcher-bunk on equally plastic struts that were attached to the floor. The floor itself was see-through. Thick cables ran from the curved walls to the centre of the room underneath it, there also seemed to be a playground swing attached. And in the centre of the room above and under the floor there was a glowing column, surrounded by a console that had _everything_ on it. All kinds of dials and buttons and turnable things and levers and bells. Puttering around it with a kind of scientific joy was a tall thin man with messy brown hair and a bowtie. 

The man looked over at Jay and flashed him a grin. “Impressive, isn’t it? Shame you didn’t see the outside first, you could say the obvious thing. I love it when they say the obvious thing. I’m the Doctor, by the way.”

It all clicked together then, alarming connection making alarming connection. Jay couldn’t believe any of it. “But— I know you. You’re,” he coughed on the word, thankfully not going into a fit. “You’re a TV show. Your name is Matt!”  
“Am I?” The bowtie man paused for a second and stared into the distance with his already-impressive chin jutting out a little. A smug grin played on his face. “It’s always fun when I get on TV. They did get the name wrong, though, don’t tell anyone that, it’d break the illusion.”  
Jay shook his head, paused for the wave of dizziness which didn’t come. Okay. He tuned to look at the little girl and said, “And you’re… Amy? You’re supposed to be a grown lady.”  
Her freckles stood out when she scowled. “I’m Amelia. And I’m not a _lady,_ ” she said. “Not yet. I’m nine, that’s still a girl.”  
Jay stuttered a little before apologizing, unsure of what else to say. The name ‘Amy’ brought up a sore spot in his head that threatened to grow and make him black out again. He tried to ignore it.  
“It’s alright, Amelia, sometimes these things happen,” the Doctor was saying over his shoulder as he hopped around the console somewhere Jay couldn’t see him. He seemed to circle around somewhere below Jay’s eye-level and then come back up the other side, picking up and putting down all kinds of instruments and monitors on the way. “Little mix-ups, blips in time and space… and writing.”  
  
“Hmph.” Amelia marched away from where Jay was laying and then circled back, too, holding something in her hand. “Here.” She passed him a baseball cap that he couldn’t remember putting on. “We found it beside you,” she said, backing up when he failed to do anything interesting and hopping up onto the large console, swinging her short legs back and forth. “Do you remember it?  
  
It definitely _seemed_ like one of his. He turned it over in his hands as much as he could when he was on his side. “Yeah. Uh, thank you.”   
Not his usual hat. When he'd been wearing it, he’d. He’d called Tim, in the forest, and then—- God he’d fucked up. He’d fucked up really badly. And then the hooded person, and the basement… He should be dead. He’d been _gone._ “How’d you find me?”  
  
“Hyper-space accident,” the Doctor said matter-of-factly. He came over and started scanning Jay with a screwdriver, the super-sci-fi one that had a proper name Jay couldn’t remember. He was passing it from Jay’s head to his feet. The light on the end looked like it might’ve been what woke Jay up. “You were in a very interesting place.” The Doctor paused suddenly and his voice became very serious, eyes searching. “What’s your name?”

“I—- Jay,” Jay said, adding his last name a second later like it would matter to the Doctor if he knew Jay’s insignificant last name. “Do you mean, I got—-” His head was spinning again with names and numbers and blurred images narrated by warped voices. “I was in the Ark?”  
“Yes? Maybe. Interesting. That you call it that. Arks, plenty of arks, arcs too, everywhere. Useful shorthand. But no, you were in a pocket dimension. They’re useful too. For storing things, usually, like… food.” The Doctor popped up to his feet again. He never seemed to stop moving for long. He went back over to the console, twisted some knobs and what looked like faucets, poked Amelia on the nose gently as he passed by her. She wrinkled her nose at him. He kept talking to Jay over his shoulder, “Got you out, though, not a tick, nothing’s going to eat you here. One of the safest vehicles in the universe!”  
“I know,” Jay said, because he _did._ He’d watched the show on a marathon in college, and then off and on when he woke up in hotel rooms with the TV still on for company and as a kind of early warning system should that thing show up.

 _That_ thing. _Cold, pain. A hand that wasn’t a hand reaching out—-_ Revulsion crawled over his skin. Jay rubbed his arm, missing his usual jacket. “If you found me, did you see a. A thing? The one that started all of this?” The spaceman pilot seemed to know about everything else, Jay assumed he must have at least seen It. (Right? Jay wasn’t crazy. Right?)  
“Oh _that._ Yes, yes definitely,” he answered. “I saw that, it saw me without any eyes, fascinating biology. It was looking for you. Don’t worry, it won’t find you here either.”  
“What _was_ it?” Jay burst out. “What does it _want_?”  
“No idea,” the Doctor said brightly. He was fussing with his screwdriver again, looking into the bulb on its end between the open clamps like it was showing him the secrets of the universe in wavering green. “Haven’t met anything like it before, well maybe one or two things, the not-physically present unless seen is _interesting,_ could study it. Don’t want to! One of the time’s it's better to run. I'm good at running.” Abruptly he shut the screwdriver and pushed it into his top shirt pocket, then turned on his heel and strode over to where Jay was still laying. He offered Jay a hand. “You were running.”  
  
Jay took the Doctor's hand numbly and shook it, like he had been taught was polite, and then let himself be pulled into a sitting position. “Yeah.”  
The Doctor crouched a foot or so in front of him, hands wringing themselves, still folded up by his throat. He was looking at Jay directly now, not at his wounds or whatever had chased him but at him. His eyes were sharp and intent. “You were trying to help, you were making notes of it. Don’t ask me how I know this, I’m just clever.” He paused for a brief second where Jay might've been supposed to have asked how he knew it. Then he steamrolled on, “Nothing like I’ve ever seen and you were standing up to it. Amazing. You're very brave. Still better to run though. What I want to know, what I want to _know_ is what you are going to do.”  
  
“I…” Jay swallowed. The dryness in his throat hurt. “I just wanted it to be over.” It hurt too to say that, thinking of Alex. And thinking of Tim. He’d apologized, but Tim had never picked up the phone, and then something—- something wavery and Jay had almost _hurt_ him, hadn’t he?  
“It’s over.” The Doctor sounded gravelly and serious now. He kept looking at Jay intently. “You got away. Now, what are you going to do?”  
“It’s never over,” Jay answered without thinking. When he said it he knew it was the truth. He pressed his palms against his forehead. “You only think it is, and then— then it gets worse. There’s no way out of it.”  _Ever,_ he thought.  _There can't be._  
“No, Jay, you’re wrong. Listen. There’s always,  _always,_ a way out.” The Doctor kept moving his hands as he talked, bending and unbending his fingers. Now he kept his palms flat and opened his hands like he was miming reading a book, or laying out an offering. “This is one. Talk to me.”

  
Jay was still for a second. Then he pulled his knees up and pressed his forehead into them. He knew somewhere in his head that this was childish and he should be embarrassed, but he was way too far gone to care if this wasn’t happening, and if it _was,_ who was the Doctor to judge him?    
He wondered where his camera was. A second later, sharply, he wondered how he hadn’t noticed it was gone before. Now that he was taking more stock of himself, the ever-present weight on his shoulders and the back of his neck was gone, too. Just gone.  
So, what? He had to die for it to stop? _Lead me to death.  
_ But... if he'd died, maybe that did it. Fulfilled whatever it was Alex had wanted done. Maybe _he_ was done. Jay had no idea what to do with that. He hadn’t considered getting out in years.  
And wht could he do? Look for Alex and help him but Alex was out there somewhere, homicidal, maybe dead. Help Tim but Tim must hate him now, he'd be better off away from Jay. Jay didn’t really _have_ any other friends, no apartment, God only knew where his car was...  
  
"You can go anywhere," the Doctor said, gently. "On your planet, that would be the easiest for you. We can take you there."  
“I want to go home,” spilled out of Jay's mouth before he could stop it _._  
  
The words hung in a brief silence more dramatic than he'd meant for them to be. They were the truth, too, he realized for the second time that day. _  
_Amelia broke the moment, asking incredulously, “But why would you want to go _there_?”  
“I haven’t been there in a… long time,” he replied, not really lying. “It’d be nice to see everyone again.” If he was really _out,_ finally, it would be nice to see everyone again. Just to see that they were still real, that everything outside of  _all this_ still made any kind of sense.  
“ _I_ wouldn’t want to go home,” the little girl mumbled.  
“And I don’t have a home to go back to, so I’m not sure if I would or wouldn’t!” The Doctor said, looking back and forth between them with a series of bobs in his head that reminded Jay of a bird dipping for worms, although he didn’t say that. “Still. Home. I am nobody’s taxi service but I can, I suppose, be a post-rescue referral… service. Where is your home, Jay?”  
Jay told him. Then, remembering more of the tagline of the show, he specified the year, “Um. Do you know what month it was, wherever I was?”  
“Time’s an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. Little joke, don’t mind it.” The Doctor was on his feet again, hovering around the console like a bird around a feeder. He looked over at Jay with barely a twitch of his head and then looked away, his tone dropping. “There was no time where you were.”  
“Fine,” Jay said to himself. He rubbed his face again. “Fine. How about… ” His mind rolled. How long had it been? “June.”  
“June! Twenty-fourteen. On a Friday? All the good things happen on Fridays.”  
“You met me on Friday,” Amelia spoke up.  
The Doctor pointed at her and nodded. “I certainly did. And you met me! Best co-pilot a Time Lord could ask for.”  
Amelia smiled at that. The Doctor smiled back and threw a lightswitch, causing the entire ship to give an almighty lurch, to his and Amelia's apparent delight.  
“Okay,” Jay said to himself, under his breath. He laid back down on the pallet thing that he’d woken up on because he was not strong enough then to stand up to the violent pitch the ship had just spun itself into. His head was spinning as it was.  
  
  
A couple minutes later, or so it seemed to Jay, the ship settled down again with a duller _thud_ than he would’ve thought a physics-improbable box was capable of. The Doctor opened the doors for him, peering out cautiously before pronouncing, “It’s all right. Definitely your universe, everything’s technically your timestream, June twentieth. Twenty-fourteen. Alabama. All yours,” he added, a little gentler than before.  
  
Jay mildly resented having to be talked to gently but he was mostly focused on keeping his hands from shaking. Somehow the light and dry heat of his home felt way, way more real than anything that had happened to him in the last whatever it had been, since he’d been down in that basement, and he was starting to feel fear tighten its cold grip on him again.  
Still. He couldn’t just stand there; he’d been waiting for things for way too long at this point. He stepped outside, felt the hot wind hit him, and then started shakily up the walkway to the house. It looked mostly the same. The doorbell was new.  
  
Behind him, the little girl’s voice floated out from where she’d been standing behind him in the doorway. “I’ve never been to America before,” she said earnestly. “Can we get some cheeseburgers? And a milkshake?”  
“Cheeseburgers and a milkshake? Yes, might as well. Might. As. Well,” the Doctor’s fading voice replied. “But not in Manhattan, I stay out of there.” Then the sound of a door shutting, and the weird squeak-whoosh of the spaceship destabilizing and vanishing.  
  
When Jay turned around it was gone. The air on the street was quiet and still.  
He belatedly realized he should’ve said thank you, to them. Or asked more about where they’d found him— gotten some _answers._ Or asked about Tim, or anything. _Stupid,_ he thought at himself, angrily. _Stupid.  
_ But yelling at himself wouldn’t really serve a purpose. Hadn’t he learned that? Out of anything, wasn’t there _something_ he’d learned?  Don’t walk up to odd buildings, maybe. He rubbed his face, focusing on not shaking.  
  
Then, abruptly, someone inside the house opened the front door. “ _Jay_?”  
“Uh. Yeah,” he said, somehow stumbling over two words. It took a second for him to put his hand down from his face, and another to pull up something like a smile. “… hi.”  
 **  
//**


End file.
